Visitors and Robots?

[Ezana4CE]

I was looking over some of the site functions and got curious when I saw the “current visitors” tab. I was wondering, “how would AGN know who these people are?” When I clicked that tab many of the visitors just said “Guest” where a username would be. BUT I also noticed bots that were combing the threads. Some of had huge tech company names attached to them and others had names I’ve never heard of. I clicked one of the bot names and it started to take me to another site. I closed that tab.

I don’t know much about bots. Can any members or staff explain their purpose here? I would imagine some are the result of people using search engines, but what about some of the other ones? Are any of them malicious? Is there a way that we can differentiate one from another with relative ease?

 

[John "spysir" Blount]

Marketing and ??? bot.s . At least one is banned "from operating on U.S. Servers" (don't ask me) .

Huawei - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex

Semrush - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Gerry52]

Dang it Dave, from the title I thought someone was finally addressing the illegal alien problem, illegal aliens from another PLANET, that is. Interesting!

 

[Ezana4CE]

Marketing and ??? bot.s . At least one is banned "from operating on U.S. Servers" (don't ask me) .

Huawei - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex

Semrush - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I can understand a bot working to collect data for marketing purposes. But what are they doing viewing AGN buyer/seller feedback? It makes me think that perhaps scammers or hackers are somehow at work behind the scenes. But I don’t know about that sort of thing so I asked.

 

[HubenK1Sniper92]

It’s probably the AGN Gestapo agents that watch the threads to make sure nothing but kind words are said and to filter out what they consider not acceptable, kind of like the Facebook fact checkers

 

[Spartan]

It's not nearly as nefarious as it may seem. Some of those bots are simple there because someone shared dynamic content from this platform on another platform (e.g., Facebook). Others are there because they are crawling the forum for search engine data (e.g., when you google something airgun related, AGN will come up in the google results because google scans the forum...it's the only way they can know what info that is posted here so they can include it in their search results). Others are there for various other data mining purposes that take place constantly across the internet. The owners of this forum domain can choose to lock it down as much as they would like to....basically reject all (or at least most) bots. Here, they have chosen to leave it fairly open and for good reason: They rely on social media and the rest of the internet to drive traffic to this forum.